Interaction of retries, timeout and max_repetitions

[PrestonTaylor]

I'd like to understand better how these settings work.

• If a single packet is dropped does it merely retry that "repetition" or does it start at the beginning of the request?
• Is the timeout for the entire request for single repetition, if it's for the entire request is there some way to do it per repetition?
• How does the timeout interact with retries? Does the timeout timer reset with a retry?

It seems to me currently that having a large module that walks some large trees is problematic if not impossible to pull off. in thousands of packets 1 or 2 drops should be expected even on a high quality network but If I shorten the timeout to handle dropped packets better it may not be long enough for a slower device to respond. Hopefully some clarification on these things will help me tune the settings.